Thursday, January 22, 2009
A client of mine was telling me about the new and improved role of IT in their organization and said, due to increased visibility, there was a greater need than ever for analysts and PMs to be able to present data effectively to their executive team.
The first questions I had was “What does effective mean and what aren’t they doing well today?”
It turns out that many of our best IT’ers feel the need to totally dump everything they know on the unsuspecting, and often uninterested, executives. They know they shouldn’t, but it’s like that second cookie and the temptation to tell all is just too great.
The first thing we all need to realize is that we all have different jobs. As an analyst I may need all the details, but my boss may only need to know the results, bottom line, implications or trends buried in all that data. They don’t want, or need, a data dump.
So the first step in any presentation should be to understand your audience, their expectations, their knowledge of the topic and what they want to know from you. Once we are very clear on this, we can design a presentation to fit.
So, what about all this data? In the late 1700’s a gentleman by the name of William Playfair developed the line, bar and pie charts as we know them today. He must have felt pity for all those execs trying to sit through long and arduous presentations of mountains of data by well intentioned IT’ers. The intent of charts is to demonstrate relationships more quickly and more clearly than narratives or tables, and it is critical to use the right tool for the job. If we don’t have much data, then a table may do the trick. If we have lots of data and we want to show trends, we would use line charts or column charts. When we’re describing correlations, then may a scatter diagram will do the trick.
The point with any chart is to figure out what you want to say, and then pick the tool that does it best. The content you include will be judged on quality, relevance and the integrity with which you displayed it. We all know data can be “gamed”, and it is important that you use the tools honestly. Every chart you create should have a message, and that message should be the title of the chart. Don’t make those poor old execs work so hard…tell them what you are trying to tell them!!
Article written by: Mary Repetto, Business Analysis Curricula Practice Owner, TEKsystems Partner via Lighthouse Consulting Partners
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